Regency Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles Book 5) by Gene Doucette Page A
Authors: Gene Doucette
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everything that was accomplished there. What you won’t read about is the assassin who was in Vienna with the delegates. The reason you won’t is that I was there to stop him.
Well, not just me.
* * *
Her name was Anna. I never got a last name, but she may not have had one to give. That was a pretty common thing for a long time. If you didn’t have a title or some sort of highborn lineage you might have still had a family name, but nobody much cared what it was. And a lot of the time it wasn’t even a name at all; it was whatever your dad did. Thus, a world full of Smiths.
I didn’t bother to invent last names to go with the first names I’d also invented, unless I was traveling in the kind of crowd that expected one, and then it was tricky. I’ve invented entire royal bloodlines—and, on a couple of occasions, entire countries—just to get into decent parties, a trick that only works until someone does a little research.
Anna was beautiful and smart and just the right kind of dangerous to get me killed, which was often what I looked for in a woman, to be entirely honest. The interesting ones are somehow almost always the ones who come with life-threatening risk on the side. It keeps my life exciting, and might also explain why I have trust issues.
When I first saw her she didn’t look like someone who had no last name. She was in a powder blue dress with bright white lacing, which in this particular part of town drew attention the way a newly blossomed flower would catch the eye in a bed of weeds. If the outfit had been more threadbare and dirtier, she might have been mistaken for a prostitute; otherwise, the obvious conclusion was that she was an out-of-place noblewoman.
I’m not saying that was what she was, I’m saying that was how she dressed. Noblewomen tended to wear clean dresses, and sport a lot of layers. About fifty years earlier, it was possible to tell how close a woman was to royalty by the number of layers one had to remove to see them naked. I never undressed a queen, but based on what was involved in unclothing a lady-in-waiting I’m guessing doing so would require a skilled lock-pick, a small axe and a tremendous amount of patience.
Anna dressed like someone from court—the English court—and wore enough finery to make it plausible for her to have breathed the same air as a king somewhere along the way. She had raven-black hair tied in a complicated set of knots that brought it down past her shoulders in a tight curl, and a dress that was off the shoulders –she had a wrap around them—and showed off an impressive bosom.
When I found her she was standing in an alley, looking deeply perplexed. That perplexity had nothing to do with the dirt or the alley, or even the rough part of town where the dirt and the alley were located. It also had nothing to do with the unwashed gentlemen milling about not far from her, looking as if they meant to either hire her for prostitutional duties or harm her in some more rapacious way for free.
I doubt I looked much better than those men in her eyes. (Her eyes were a deep coffee brown, by the way.) I had on nicer clothing than they did, but I’d been wearing them for a few days. This wasn’t unusual—down at the peasantry level having more than a couple of outfits wasn’t too common—but I was actually traveling with a decent sum of funds and could afford to not be seen in the same coat over and over, provided I remembered to get back to the flat I was renting before I passed out, rather than after. It had been a few days since that had happened.
She was out of breath, and her eyes were searching all of our faces and then the walls and the windows. It was a cloudy day but visibility wasn’t too terrible because cities hadn’t invented pollution yet, so there were no hidden mysteries. Whatever she was looking for, she couldn’t find it.
More importantly for her immediate wellbeing,
Well, not just me.
* * *
Her name was Anna. I never got a last name, but she may not have had one to give. That was a pretty common thing for a long time. If you didn’t have a title or some sort of highborn lineage you might have still had a family name, but nobody much cared what it was. And a lot of the time it wasn’t even a name at all; it was whatever your dad did. Thus, a world full of Smiths.
I didn’t bother to invent last names to go with the first names I’d also invented, unless I was traveling in the kind of crowd that expected one, and then it was tricky. I’ve invented entire royal bloodlines—and, on a couple of occasions, entire countries—just to get into decent parties, a trick that only works until someone does a little research.
Anna was beautiful and smart and just the right kind of dangerous to get me killed, which was often what I looked for in a woman, to be entirely honest. The interesting ones are somehow almost always the ones who come with life-threatening risk on the side. It keeps my life exciting, and might also explain why I have trust issues.
When I first saw her she didn’t look like someone who had no last name. She was in a powder blue dress with bright white lacing, which in this particular part of town drew attention the way a newly blossomed flower would catch the eye in a bed of weeds. If the outfit had been more threadbare and dirtier, she might have been mistaken for a prostitute; otherwise, the obvious conclusion was that she was an out-of-place noblewoman.
I’m not saying that was what she was, I’m saying that was how she dressed. Noblewomen tended to wear clean dresses, and sport a lot of layers. About fifty years earlier, it was possible to tell how close a woman was to royalty by the number of layers one had to remove to see them naked. I never undressed a queen, but based on what was involved in unclothing a lady-in-waiting I’m guessing doing so would require a skilled lock-pick, a small axe and a tremendous amount of patience.
Anna dressed like someone from court—the English court—and wore enough finery to make it plausible for her to have breathed the same air as a king somewhere along the way. She had raven-black hair tied in a complicated set of knots that brought it down past her shoulders in a tight curl, and a dress that was off the shoulders –she had a wrap around them—and showed off an impressive bosom.
When I found her she was standing in an alley, looking deeply perplexed. That perplexity had nothing to do with the dirt or the alley, or even the rough part of town where the dirt and the alley were located. It also had nothing to do with the unwashed gentlemen milling about not far from her, looking as if they meant to either hire her for prostitutional duties or harm her in some more rapacious way for free.
I doubt I looked much better than those men in her eyes. (Her eyes were a deep coffee brown, by the way.) I had on nicer clothing than they did, but I’d been wearing them for a few days. This wasn’t unusual—down at the peasantry level having more than a couple of outfits wasn’t too common—but I was actually traveling with a decent sum of funds and could afford to not be seen in the same coat over and over, provided I remembered to get back to the flat I was renting before I passed out, rather than after. It had been a few days since that had happened.
She was out of breath, and her eyes were searching all of our faces and then the walls and the windows. It was a cloudy day but visibility wasn’t too terrible because cities hadn’t invented pollution yet, so there were no hidden mysteries. Whatever she was looking for, she couldn’t find it.
More importantly for her immediate wellbeing,
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